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Saturday, July 06, 2013

"Your best friends are the ones who will rip into you and tell you the truth and what you need to hear. They won’t sugar coat it, but there will be plenty of whisky to help out.
You could be moping around, feeling sorry for yourself because Betty Sue won’t return your phone calls. You thought she was darn special didn’t you? Your friends don’t understand the heart break you’re going through. She’s a fucking unique snow flake and the prettiest of them all. She may be the love of your life. Damn, are you reading that? You see how pathetic you sound? That’s bitch talk.
If your friends are true friends, they will listen to your little bitchfest, but probably give you three, four minutes tops until they tell you stop being a pussy. That they didn’t know you were on your period and you should probably go to Walmart and get the premium brand of tampons to stop your heavy bleeding."

"Reformation Church pastor Kevin Swanson recently went on his Generations with Vision radio show to condemn Star Trek Into Darkness because it shows James Kirk in a post-coital bed with members of the "wrong species." To which we can only respond—has Swanson ever seen Star Trek? On a June episode of Generations with Vision, Swanson explained that he wasn't going to take his children to see the new Star Trek movie because Star Trek—and evolutionary theory, he claimed—promotes interspecies romance, which is equivalent to bestiality in his estimation..."

Thursday, July 04, 2013

"I tried to do what I always did when life got stressful – I trained. Normal types might scoff at the notion of hitting the gym with so much shit going on, but they aren't seeing the big picture – or at least my big picture. I don't punish myself with drop-sets and high-rep squats to build muscle. I do it to kill my demons. We all have demons inside of us. Some have more than others, and some guys can deal with them better than the next...

So I smash my demons. I crush them under PR's. And if I'm too fucked up to train heavy, I torch them with extended sets, rip them apart with rest pauses and drop sets, and then chase them away with whatever fucked-up finishing exercise I can think of. The demons always come back, mind you, but as long as I have a key to my gym I can stay one step ahead...

When setting goals, keep your goal specific to yourself and a select few. Keep your goal general to all others. In other words, if your goal is to bench 400 pounds, keep that as a marker in your mind, but if others ask just tell them, "I'm training for a bigger bench," or "I'm working toward a new PR." Your goal may be to get your body fat down to 6%, but all the masses need to know is, "I'm dieting right now." The reason for this is simple: 90% of everyone you meet are negative pricks who will go out of their way to tell you why you can't do something. Once they know your goal, they'll try and tear you down. Just keep it vague, and all they can do is wish you success. Of course, they may still try to tear you down once you've actually accomplished your goal, but who cares. You've done the work and have the results to show for it. They couldn't have done it.

Awesome work - Mark's Daily Apple:
"Around this time, I ventured into the paleo lifestyle and it made more sense to me, but like most people, I was scared to start eating that much fat in my diet (no matter if it was healthy or not). So, I introduced certain ideas from the paleo plans into my life slowly. I started eating more organic meat, avocados, nuts, and eggs. The problem was that I still had grains, legumes, soy, and sweeteners in my diet. After a few more months, I read somewhere that the paleo diet was actually credited with helping some people with eating disorders to overcome them. Maybe this was the golden ticket I was looking for?
I began to realize that living healthy wasn’t just about eating healthy and working out. It was a complete behavior shift. I suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (not OCD), so I tend to be perfectionistic and rigid in my way of living anyways. My goal has been to accept myself the way that I am and have more compassion for myself when I fail and allow my life to just flow instead of being scheduled all of the time."

Wednesday, July 03, 2013

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

"Today, I saw my older sister for the first time in three years. We hadn't spoke since I found out that she was the woman my college boyfriend left me for. Unfortunately, our reunion was fueled by her two-year-old son's desire to meet his dad. My husband. FML"

"Federal law enforcement agents have been using warrantless cell-tower locational tracking of criminal suspects in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling 18 months ago that they need probable-cause warrants from judges to affix covert GPS devices to vehicles. But the law on cell-site locational tracking is all over the books, with judges offering mixed rulings on whether warrants are needed. While dozens of lower courts have ruled on the issue, only two appellate courts have. All of which means some suspects are being convicted based on locational data of what towers their cell phones are pinging, and others are not, because some courts are requiring warrants."

"The new amendments would prevent insurance plans on Obamacare’s health marketplaces from covering abortion services, ban “sex-selective” abortions, impose unnecessary restrictions on doctors administering the abortion pill to women, and require the state’s abortion clinics to adhere to complicated new regulations that would likely force most of them to close. A similar package of abortion restrictions has inspired weeks of protest in Texas, where thousands of reproductive rights activists have been rallying at the state capitol."

"In Proof of Heaven, Alexander writes that he spent seven days in "a coma caused by a rare case of E. coli bacterial meningitis." There is no indication in the book that it was Laura Potter, and not bacterial meningitis, that induced his coma, or that the physicians in the ICU maintained his coma in the days that followed through the use of anesthetics. Alexander also writes that during his week in the ICU he was present "in body alone," that the bacterial assault had left him with an "all-but-destroyed brain." He notes that by conventional scientific understanding, "if you don't have a working brain, you can't be conscious," and a key point of his argument for the reality of the realms he claims to have visited is that his memories could not have been hallucinations, since he didn't possess a brain capable of creating even a hallucinatory conscious experience. I ask Potter whether the manic, agitated state that Alexander exhibited whenever they weaned him off his anesthetics during his first days of coma would meet her definition of conscious. "Yes," she says. "Conscious but delirious.""

"One of the book's most dramatic scenes takes place just before she sends him from the ER to the ICU:

In the final moments before leaving the emergency room, and after two straight hours of guttural animal wails and groaning, I became quiet. Then, out of nowhere, I shouted three words. They were crystal clear, and heard by all the doctors and nurses present, as well as by Holley, who stood a few paces away, just on the other side of the curtain.

"God, help me!"

Everyone rushed over to the stretcher. By the time they got to me, I was completely unresponsive.

Potter has no recollection of this incident, or of that shouted plea. What she does remember is that she had intubated Alexander more than an hour prior to his departure from the emergency room, snaking a plastic tube down his throat, through his vocal cords, and into his trachea. Could she imagine her intubated patient being able to speak at all, let alone in a crystal-clear way?

"The first step in countering the divide and conquer by appealing to collectivist thinking is to stop using WE arguments during any discussion or debate. "Well, WE did enslave black Africans by taking them from their homes and forcing them to work in the cotton fields!" "After all, WE did take the land away from the Native Americans!" "WE saved the French from the Germans in World War 2!" "WE won the Superbowl!!!!!" "WE get the leaders WE deserve since WE vote!"

WE did no such things.

Just because you have been indoctrinated to identify yourself along lines of Nationality, Gender, Ethnicity or any other means of differentiation, doesn't mean your responsible for the actions of those who may share those same similarities. But by making you accept collective responsibility, THEY make WE much more easily divided and conquered, because we become concerned with the US versus THEM amongst the various collectives within the serf strata of the pyramid...all the while carrying on in oblivion to the machinations of the upper tier."

"Everyone has excuses and, much like male nipples, they’re all useless. Strength is earned through choice and not everyone is willing to admit that. It is far easier to say, “I can’t afford to train at that gym or with that trainer…it’s too far for me to travel…I don’t have the time…I don’t have the genetics” or my all-time favorite, “They must be on steroids.” Great achievements will only come about through some form of sacrifice and not everyone is willing to make the sacrifices required."

"Nowhere has this strategy been more successful than in the United States, where an export-friendly Obama administration has presided over the largest arms-export boom in history. In 2011, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, the United States entered into arms sales agreements worth over $66 billion -- an astounding 78 percent of the world market."

Bill Hicks - "I'm so sick of arming the world, then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms, you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of them. We're like the bullies of the world, y'know. We're like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheepherder's feet. "Pick it up." "I don't wanna pick it up, Mister, you'll shoot me." "Pick up the gun." "Mister, I don't want no trouble. I just came downtown here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don't even know what gingham is, but she goes through about ten rolls a week of that stuff. I ain't looking for no trouble, Mister." "Pick up the gun." (He picks it up. Three shots ring out.) "You all saw him - he had a gun.""

"Did you know that the hoary old magician's stunt of pulling a rabbit out of a hat requires federal licensing and submission to regulations administered by the United States Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service? No, neither did I. But the whole business is governed by Title 9, Chapter I, Subchapter A, Parts 1-4 of the Animal Welfare Act, which governs most commercial handling of animals, down to even trivial arrangements. And among those regulations is a new rule requiring animal handlers, including a magician with his bunny rabbit, "to develop a plan for how they are going to respond to and recover from emergencies most likely to happen to their facility, as well as train their employees on those plans." Which is a lead-in to the odd tale of a magician and his bunny and the detailed and extensive requirements sent their way by federal bureaucrats."

"A Customs & Border Protection (CPB) report, released in response to EFF’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the agency, shows CBP has considered adding weapons to its domestic Predator drones. The report, titled “Concept of Operations for CBP’s Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System” and submitted to Congress on June 29, 2010 shows that, not only is the agency planning to sharply increase the number of Predator drones it flies and the amount of surveillance it conducts by 2016 (detailed further in a separate blog post tomorrow), but it has considered equipping its Predators with “non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize” targets of interest."

"Spencer Ackerman, formerly of Wired News and now with the Guardian, reports today: "A study conducted by a US military adviser has found that drone strikes in Afghanistan during a year of the protracted conflict caused 10 times more civilian casualties than strikes by manned fighter aircraft." The new study was referenced in an official US military journal, and shows that US officials' claims that unmanned planes can target more efficiently than manned counterparts are not true."

"The approximately 6,000 pages of documents released by the Milwaukee archdiocese include personnel files for 42 priests with substantiated allegations of sexual abuse against them, along with depositions of church leaders including New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the former archbishop of Milwaukee, and other records. The documents show that archdiocese officials struggled to deal with problem priests, sending them to treatment and then reassigning them to new parishes where no one would know their histories...

Victims have complained that the documents represent only about 10 percent of what the archdiocese turned over to the victims' attorneys during litigation. The rest of the files remain under a court seal. Victims say they want to see those as well because sexual abuse allegations also have been made against teachers in Catholic schools, choir directors and priests assigned to religious orders, not the archdiocese."

"Great news from the land of trial by jury, where ordinary citizens are the final check on government tyranny. A 40-year-old man was acquitted Monday of 13 misdemeanor vandalism charges that stemmed from protest messages written in chalk in front of three Bank of America branches in San Diego."

"The West Virginia teenager, who was 14 at the time of the incident, refused to remove an NRA shirt despite the demands of a teacher. Subsequently, the police were called on Marcum. After insisting that he was within his rights despite an officer telling him to stop talking, the eight-grader was arrested and charged with obstruction. He faced a potential $500 fine and up to a year in jail. More than two months after the debacle began, the charges against Marcum have been dropped. Judge Erin O'Briant signed the dismissal last Thursday."

"All geeks love Transformers, but Yang Junlin of Huizhou, China, took his passion for the franchise to a whole other level when he opened the “Legend of Iron” factory and began producing his own robots. Remebre that uber-cool Megatron Tank we featured a few weeks back? That was one of Yang Junlin’s iron masterpieces, but I had no idea he had created hundreds of other incredible metal sculptures. In 2006, after retiring from the army, Yang went to a concert where various steel sculptures were placed on display. Some of them were simple human figures created from twisted metal wire, but they made such an impression on him, that he decided to try and make his own steel works."

"That shift on a major public policy issue catches many government officials, especially at the federal level, flatfooted. Having built careers around the idea that it's a swell idea to arrest, imprison and brutalize people for ingesting the "wrong" intoxicant, they find themselves unable to catch up with changing times as much of the country turns its back on their drug-warrior ways...

The incoherent and contradictory quotes from President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are representative of a drug warrior establishment which also includes researchers who insist that questions of personal liberty should be subject to "science" and drug cop careerists who seem poised to continue arresting people in defiance of state-level legalization. Once again, enforcing new restrictions on people's behavior seems to come naturally to the political class and its enablers, but backing off control and letting people choose evokes anguish and panic. But back off they must, as public opinion changes."

Appropriate articles crossing my path, given I'm dealing with some training injuries. Universe wants me to get the message, clearly.

"Things were going SO well. You had been exercising regularly, eating right, building habits, and building SERIOUS momentum…and then life throws you a curveball:

You slip a disc in your back

You tear a ligament in your knee

You get mono or some other sickness

You sprain your ankle

Your head falls off

Although it probably seems like the world is over at this point, fear not, my dear Rebel friend, for there is hope. With the exception of your head falling off (we’ll put this in the S.O.L. category), everything else above is something you can work around...

Stay active any way you can

If you can’t run, can you use an elliptical or stationary bike? If you can’t use one leg or the other, can you still strength train your upper body? If you can’t use one arm/shoulder, can you still do lower body exercises like lunges/squats/step ups? If you can’t strength train, can you still go for walks? Walking is the best. If your head fell off, how the hell are you reading this?

...And it’s not just because exercise (SPOILER ALERT) is good for you! It’s because if you can find a way to exercise every day, your brain will keep thinking “I am healthy” and thus you will be more likely to make eating decisions that KEEP you healthy. Remember, diet is 90% of the battle! I know if I skip a workout or two, I tend to eat much worse on those days because my brain isn’t thinking “healthy.” So, keep yourself thinking healthy, find a way to be active, and make a game out of it to stay on target. Stuck in bed? See how many arm swings you can do. Can’t do jumping jacks? Do karate kicks and punches On cruches? See if you can “walk” a bit farther each day. Or, learn to dance like this guy. Can’t strength train? See if you can become a better runner. Yeah, it might be different than how you used to train, or even be a fraction of what you used to be capable of. Who cares? Life is a game, and you just switched up your skill tree, that’s all!

"You might not be able to lift, run, or stretch in the same ways right away. Even when you come back to full strength, it can be really frustrating. “I used to be able to do this!” “Why can’t I ___________ anymore?” Just like comparing yourself against the progress of others is a futile practice, comparing yourself to the old pre-injury version of yourself isn’t smart. The ONLY thing you can compare yourself against is who you were yesterday."

"For the foreseeable future, I won’t be able to do any serious lower body strength workouts, which bums me out to no end. However, this discovery is going to really force me to think critically about how I can stay in shape without my preferred method of traditional strength training. I expect it will be lots of upper body gymnastics work, yoga, stretching, walks and hikes, and a crazy amount of core workouts to strengthen the stabilizer muscles in my back to keep my spine safe."

"...the human animal is savage, cruel, vindictive, and murderous. This diagnosis may seem excessive if you are well-fed, content, and more or less in control of your life. It is not excessive. History and for that matter the present are full of groups butchering each other for reasons of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Irish Prots and Catholics killing each other, the IRA planting bombs in London, white Southerners lynching blacks in the South, the slow genocide of whites by blacks in South Africa, Sunnnis and Shiites killing each other, Turks butchering Armenians, black tribes in Burundi hacking each other into pieces by thousands, white Americans exterminating the Indians.
It can happen. Maybe it won’t."

Sunday, June 30, 2013

"The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications. The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties.

This hairsplitting is inimical to privacy and contrary to what at least five justices ruled just last year in a case called United States v. Jones. One of the most conservative justices on the Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that where even public information about individuals is monitored over the long term, at some point, government crosses a line and must comply with the protections of the Fourth Amendment. That principle is, if anything, even more true for Americans’ sensitive nonpublic information like phone metadata and social networking activity.

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal."

"I started thinking about this earlier this month, when Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA's illegal domestic spying operation. I was struck by how many people describing something that's not much more than a bulked-up non disclosure agreement spoke of some sacred secrecy "oath." The meme has really taken hold -- Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan is now explicitly demanding that CIA employees "Honor The Oath," thereby implying that a secrecy agreement is of significance equal to a CIA employee's (actual) oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Doubtless many journalists will uncritically regurgitate Brennan's terminology, never pausing to consider whether there even is such a secrecy "oath," or whether it should be treated as remotely important as an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

And then I read about Obama's Insider Threat Program, his policy for getting all government employees to inform on each other and equating all leaks with aiding and abetting enemies. Here, see for yourself how insane and Stazi-like this initiative really is. It almost reads like a parody. But it isn't. It's the behavior of a paranoid government that has become psychologically obsessed with the value of the secrets it hoards. And what's at least as disturbing as the program itself is how little attention it's gotten in the press or among the public. Again, too many Americans have come to accept that massive secrecy isn't just normal, but in fact desirable.

It isn't. Secrecy is not one of the primary pillars of the strength of a democracy. Fetishizing the importance of secrecy at the expense of a focus on the Constitution, the rule of law, and transparency is like thinking your overall health is determined more by how much coffee you can consume than it is by food, water, and exercise. Secrecy is fundamentally antithetical to democracy and should be treated with great suspicion. Small amounts are a necessary evil. Beyond that, it is poison. And we have become addicted to it. Our addiction has made us lose sight of what really makes us strong: the Constitution; and just and sane policies; and our commitment to being a good nation instead of a priapic obsession with being a Great one. East Germany relied on secrecy for its strength. So did Communist Russia. Do want to use those states as role models? Is it not obvious that America would be stronger with less secrecy, not with more?"

"The Chinese government has decided that happy endings at massage parlors aren’t prostitution and are therefor legal. I was surprised it was against the law as the happy ending is one of China’s most beloved cultural exports. The court said that jerking someone off is not sex, it’s just another muscle that needs a healthy rubdown. They also said “breast massages” were OK. That’s not a woman having her boobs fondled but rather a chick using her boobs to give the man “release”. This is pretty progressive for the fucked-up draconian Chinese communist system that pretty much outlawed fun in 1945. Obviously, like a lot of things, this is just another concession to the almighty altar of capitalism. "

"We tend to think that rounded backs are an inevitable feature of aging and that everyone, if they live long enough, will eventually crumble. Such shrinking collapse is actually the result of decades of misaligned bones. People who are supported by aligned bones remain tall and upright and enjoy elongated spines and easy flexibility for an entire lifetime. "

"All journalism is advocacy journalism. No matter how it's presented, every report by every reporter advances someone's point of view. The advocacy can be hidden, as it is in the monotone narration of a news anchor for a big network like CBS or NBC (where the biases of advertisers and corporate backers like GE are disguised in a thousand subtle ways), or it can be out in the open, as it proudly is with Greenwald, or graspingly with Sorkin, or institutionally with a company like Fox.

But to pretend there's such a thing as journalism without advocacy is just silly; nobody in this business really takes that concept seriously. "Objectivity" is a fairy tale invented purely for the consumption of the credulous public, sort of like the Santa Claus myth. Obviously, journalists can strive to be balanced and objective, but that's all it is, striving...

The truly scary thing about all of this is that we're living in an age where some very strange decisions are being made about who deserves rights, and who doesn't. Someone shooting at an American soldier in Afghanistan (or who is even alleged to have done so) isn't really a soldier, and therefore isn't really protected by the Geneva Conventions, and therefore can be whisked away for life to some extralegal detention center. We can kill some Americans by drone attacks without trial because they'd ceased to have rights once they become enemy combatants, a determination made not collectively but by some Star Chamber somewhere."